The great inventor of a style fluid enough to reflect our uncertain times, a
helpless symbol of those times, an incomprehensible hoax, a clear-as-glass
poet of loneliness and dejection, the greatest living Surrealist, the last
Romantic, a frequent influence on poets much younger than he: since 1975,
when his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won almost all the awards a book
of American poems could win, readers and reviewers have bestowed on John
Ashbery all these labels. Meanwhile Ashbery – born in 1927 – has gone on
writing his poems, and writing them faster than most of us can read them. A
Worldly Country is his eleventh book of new verse in twenty years; Notes
from the Air selects from the previous ten, from April Galleons (1987) to
Where Shall I Wander (2005), beginning where his last Selected Poems
stopped. Together, the new books portray a sad decline – but not, by any
means, a decline in Ashbery’s imaginative powers. Rather, their wealth of
poems portrays the decline to which all of us are subject, the fact –
realized over and over in any life – that we will lose all the people and
things we love, that they must, as we must, grow old and die.
The verbal bounty in Ashbery’s recent work reflects the treasure of memory and
the bodily impoverishments of late life. Ashbery’s may be the best poems of
old age since Wallace Stevens’s, and if they do not even seek the kinds of
formal completion we find in Stevens, they make up for it in their range of
tones – befuddled, affectionate, bubbly, chastened, sombre, alarmed, and
then befuddled again. In one fifteen-line poem from A Worldly Country,
Ashbery imagines himself dying, and then dead, enclosed in a coffin from
which his spirit has departed:
Oh quiet noumenon
of my soul, this is it, right?
You lost the key and the answer is inside
somewhere, and where are you going to
breathe?
The box is shut that knew you
and all your friends,
voices that could have spoken in your behalf . . .
Why, what did you want me to do with them?
Another new poem, “The Gallant Needful”, instructs the next writer who hopes
to devise a late style: do not try to remain in fashion (“the clothes gave
out. No one / wanted to wear them any more”), think of yourself as a
patchwork, a palimpsest (“Mended with gay stuffs, they’ll serve”); don’t
worry if your drafts make sense only to you (“as soup is to stew, / so the
sea to bubbling chasms that prop up the ‘meaning’”); finally, “don’t expect
thanks”. The last poem in A Worldly Country even concludes, in an
unmistakably posthumous mode, by telling us that whatever Ashbery has not
done, another poet may yet do: “Those places left unplanted will be
cultivated / by another, by others. Looking back it / will seem good”.
The longest poem in A Worldly Country, “The Handshake, the Cough, the Kiss”,
joins earlier poems beloved of Ashbery’s critics in describing the arc of a
poet’s career. Here is the brilliant schoolboy, attracting local notice with
his apprentice work:
They all knew him in that ancient, wondrous
and miserable town
as the local amateur historian and vendor
of a kind of chili only the houris knew about.
Then, turning his face away, he’d try
to guess the answers to their riddles. If correct,
a kiss would reward him. If not, a retreat
to a sheet of paper or promise to better himself
in huge academic halls some kilometers away,
but they
didn’t tell him this.
“The Handshake” later turns away from one poet’s career to address poetry in
general, which cares nothing for cliques and claques (for “muddy groups” and
their rivalries) and which will outlast even its hardiest practitioner, as
rivers (which share a Latin root with “rival”) outlast dwellers on their
banks:
O songbird! You asked us to believe
in you but the way was short. Our quondam
companions persist,
a small, muddy group, adhere to the rival
shore, ravenous,
and expire.
Believe it, they feel the air.
The note of self-satire, so frequent in Ashbery, fades before such figures’
serious force.
To look back on a life spent making art is to think again on the shapes of
artistic careers, but also to think about what remains of a personal past.
Even the least consequential recollections seem precious, decades
afterwards: “We loved that too, / as we were a part of all that happened
there, the evil and the good / and all the shades in between, happy to pipe
up at roll call / or compete in the spelling bees”. (Spelling bees!)
Well-treated bright children, Ashbery implies in “The Ice Storm” (one of his
best prose poems), see life as a series of tests, with competent examiners
and set texts: “I tell myself it all seems like fun and will work out in the
end. I expect I will be asked a question I can answer and then be handed a
big prize. They’re working on it”. Yet really the judges are no smarter than
we are, and the only prize at the end is oblivion: “I am going, and they are
going with us, with us as we go”.
So insistent on late style and old age, A Worldly Country demonstrates, like a
crystal dropped in supersaturated solution, how much those topics suffused
his works of the 1980s and 90s. Half the poems in Notes from the Air could
be called (as one really is called) “Avant de Quitter Ces Lieux”, or
subtitled with the Wordsworthian phrase that A Worldly Country quotes three
times: “Was it for this?”. The title Notes from the Air suggests overheard
music, or outlines (notes) for a treatise unwritten. The poem of the same
name emphasizes (with a nod to Shakespeare’s Ulysses) the ephemerality of
everything: “Look, it says, // it has to be this way and no other. Time that
one seizes / and takes along with one is running through the holes / like
sand from a bag”.
The same poem begins with nonsense, as a mock-lecture: “A yak is a prehistoric
cabbage: of that, at least, we may be sure”. Ashbery often begins absurd and
ends sad: even the silliest turn of phrase, pursued long enough, leads him
back to isolation, yearning, or mortality. The involutions, changes of
topic, and failures of pronoun reference – what is “it”? – by which we
recognize his style point to the failures and disorientations that
characterize a distracted, dispirited mind, one that cannot accommodate (as
who can?) the knowledge that everything we cherish must someday go. Even the
greatest friendships or works of art are in the long run the fleeting
thoughts of a cloud: “This cloud imagines us and all that our story / Was
ever going to be, and we catch up / To ourselves, but they are the selves of
others” – so says a poem called, appropriately, “Riddle Me”.
Against a confessional model, in which we feel closer to a poet the more he
reveals of his biography, Ashbery suggests that we see further into his soul
the less we know about the person outside the poems: lyric poetry, of the
kind that he writes, works not by telling us all about poets’ documentable,
material lives, but by revealing only the inner man. “Now I have neither
back nor front”, he writes, “I am the way certain persons are / who never
tell you how they are / yet you know they are like you and they are.”
Some readers must see such writing as gay code. Much gets made now of
Ashbery’s homosexuality – fair enough, given the camp effects, the
pre-Stonewall traditions of covert signals and open secrets, and the
semi-secret assignations intimated so often in the parks, parties, beaches
and bathrooms (“In the bathroom there was considerable embarrassment”) of
Ashbery’s late verse. But his poems are (compared to, say, Frank O’Hara’s)
rarely sexual. They evoke, instead, more diffuse affections, remembered,
offered or bestowed, and they evoke them with an intensity proportional to
their lack of explanation: “We never knew what prompted us to smile / or to
embrace”. Amidst all the generality and all the symbols, all the jokes and
all the evasions, it is a shock to discover “The History of My Life”, a
really bleak outline of Ashbery’s real biography (he did indeed lose a
brother in childhood):
Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.
I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even. There was I: a stinking adult.
I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in. No soap.
Ashbery’s flirtatious nonsense and rococo cartoonishness are, these lines
suggest, defences against the deep-freeze isolation that the poet might
otherwise feel.
Yet poems like that one are exceptions. Usually Ashbery’s late work looks back
– digressively, distractedly, confusingly, or confusedly – on a life that
could be (they imply) anyone’s, gay or heterosexual, male or female, yours
(as in his book title Your Name Here) or Ovid’s. The author of Ars Amatoria
turns up in A Worldly Country as the star of “an infomercial” in which he
recalls his life in the second person: “You were careful about choosing your
companions, did what / was expected of you, rose early to greet the punching
ball” (ie, the sun), and yet he too must die: “the good stuff was poised to
return, but the screen crashed, / and there is no help in us, over and under
the now receding water”.
The poems return constantly to the largest possible subjects – loss, love,
helplessness and death – but they can scrutinize smaller ones too. “Redeemed
Area” concerns the ways in which the old check one another, and themselves,
for signs of dementia: “Do you know where you live? Probably. / Abner is
getting too old to drive but won’t admit it”. “Objection Sustained” reflects
fears about global warming: “The can of ice slipped and cracked. / All my
worldly belongings weren’t / so worldly anymore”. Ashbery elsewhere
represents the approaching end of a life with self-conscious vagueness, with
images of contraction and departure, and by portraying hypnopompic states,
as in “The Business of Falling Asleep”: “Yes, but a weird creepy feeling
came over me that you might know about all this, not [have] wanted to tell
me but just know. It’s amazing how the past shrinks to the size of your
palm, forced to hold all that now”.
For each poem that sticks to one clear topic, though, there are three that, on
first reading, have none: some include language that sounds
computer-generated (“Avuncular and teeming, the kind luggage / hosed down
the original site”), though few remain in that frustrating mode for long.
Ashbery’s non sequiturs throw us back on the reasons we have tried to follow
them, on why we take, or try to take, an interest in any topic at all – on
our desire for conversation, for companionship, for evidence that we are not
entirely alone. He seeks such evidence in our artistic inheritance, and in
the flimsiest components of daily speech, stitching into his shimmery fabric
a host of phrases we might, without him, think incompatible with serious
verse:
Surely, passing through the town,
we contributed a little to the regional economy,
received credit for showing our faces.
So what if the only theater in town
had been turned into a funeral parlor?
There are few things more theatrical than
death,
one supposes, though one doesn’t know.
No modern poetry half so original incorporates half so many clichés. I count
at least five in those seven lines, each a reminder that our language – ugly
or beautiful – is never ours alone. Rather, a language, a sociolect, a
culture, is something that we inherit, something we then (after “passing
through” and dying) bequeath.
Ashbery seems more contemporary, more topical, now than when he started
writing, though the culture has changed around him more than he has changed:
he has become the poet of our multi-tasking, interruption-filled, and
entertainment-seeking days. “I wish I could help but I’ve a million things
to do”, Ashbery explains, “and restoring your peace of mind isn’t one of
them. There goes my phone . . . .” If you see this poet as a recorder, not
of his life, but of his times, you will see both how he appropriates modern
catchphrases (another poem says it will “take a commercial break”) and how
fast those catchphrases collide. A poem called “Mottled Tuesday” announces,
“I’ll add one more scoop / to the pile of retail”, then addresses someone (a
beloved? a reader? a child?) as “my sinking laundry boat, point of
departure, / my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick”. “Racked by jetsam, we
cry out for flotsam”, he protests elsewhere, “anything to stanch the hole in
the big ad.”
Critics make heavy weather of the flow of information through Ashbery’s poems
– almost any piece of news or slang, as well as any shard of old high
culture, may turn up, as if brought in by those tides. But Ashbery’s
sustained interest lies more with the tides than with anything they bring
in. You can find Emerson and Jacques de Vaucanson, Sibelius and Shakespeare,
John Dewey and Admiral Dewey (see the very funny “Memories of Imperialism”),
and much else in his lines if you want them:
Once, on Mannahatta’s bleak shore,
I trolled for spunkfish, but caught naught,
nothing save
a rubber plunger or two. It was awful,
at that time. Now everything is cheerful.
I wonder, does it make a difference?
Here Ashbery evokes Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop and Hart
Crane (and the waterfronts where Crane looked for rough sex) all at once.
Yet to chase allusions, or to seek a continuous tradition, is to miss the
point. Where other poets ask us to look everything up, or berate us for not
being as learned as they, Ashbery implies that life is too short for him to
expect us to learn what he knows: “Where do the scraps / Of meaning come
from? . . . . It was all going / To be scattered anyway”.
The same anything-goes, anything-could-come-next qualities that make his verse
so hard to memorize give the same verse its peculiar mimetic virtues. Our
thought includes both remembering and forgetting, both concentration and
distraction, and Ashbery’s poems get closer to the moment-by-moment way that
our minds work (at least to the way that we now believe they work) than
earlier poets have ever come. If we find ourselves holding a firm belief,
Ashbery says, it’s not because we have found solid proof: rather, a belief,
like a memory, “gets worn into the mind like a crease in a road map that has
been folded up the wrong way too many times”. If his poems work as our minds
do, can we understand them any better than we understand ourselves? “I don’t
understand myself”, Ashbery writes, “only segments / of myself that
misunderstand each other.” His readers may feel the same way, even though
(perhaps because) his poems tell us over and over how much he wants to reach
us: “I need your disapproval, / can’t live without your churlish ways”.
Ashbery would be the most whimsical poet now writing were he not also the
loneliest: he needs us, and tells us he needs us, as few poets do. Most of
his recent books end with romantic gestures addressed to a “you” who may
only be any reader, and whose companionship he yearns to retain: “That’s all
any of us gets, / why I am happy with you, alone, just us”. Or, in a more
extravagant (sillier) mode that sounds like wishful thinking: “You wore your
cummerbund with the stars and stripes. I, kilted in lime, held a stethoscope
to the head of the parting guest. Together, we were a couple forever”. The
poet’s urgent solicitations and his ruminations on mortality are of a piece,
since poems survive – and traces of their otherwise vanished authors
survive within them – only if they portray (whatever else they do), for
later readers, some elements we recognize in ourselves: that “is why I am
you, why we two / never quite seem to escape each other’s shadow”. If you do
not feel that the poems address you, such claims are hubris. If you do, then
those lines describe what happens when you read a poem, and so do these: “We
are the people we came to see / or might as well be, bringing cabbages as
gifts, / talking nonstop, barbed wire stringing the trees”.
As unthinkable as Ashbery’s creations would be without the modernists, his
late poems instead, and understandably, set him beside Edward Lear. Ashbery
quotes Lear repeatedly, and titles a cento – a poem made of lines from other
poets – “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” (a double entendre for Ashbery,
though not for Lear). As in Lear, without the absurdities, we could not face
the profundities, and it may be from trivial or bizarre chances and hobbies
that most of the joys that make our lives worth while come. Like Lear, late
Ashbery tries to make his most formally intricate poems feel like games, or
like jokes: a pantoum called “Phantoum” (it ends “you had to be a ghost to
appreciate it”), a poem written to be inscribed on a Minneapolis bridge (see
Eric Lorberer, “The Ashbery Bridge”, Jubilat 13, 2007), a poem in two-part
lines (imitated from biblical Hebrew) in which the second half always
restates the first: “The one who runs little, he who barely trips along /
Knows how short the day is, how few the hours of light”. Here the redundancy
(what medieval writers called copia) feels like a way to keep going; here,
as often in Ashbery’s later poetry, the onward procession of hard-to-process
sentences renders pathetic, even tragic, the command familiar to radio
announcers: Keep talking, no matter what – as if the plug would be pulled,
the channel changed, the life ended, at the first sign of dead air.
The last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great
model, and the other half thought incomprehensible, was probably T. S.
Eliot. But Eliot, by the time he became famous, came with instruction
manuals, moral directives, claims about good and bad taste, and about right
and wrong. Ashbery comes instead with an early, self-satirical poem entitled
“The Instruction Manual”, and with a career-long sense that there are no
wrong answers, only more or less interesting possibilities. He is the ideal
poet to preside over our anti-hierarchical age, a wistful, affectionate
democrat with our entire word-hoard at his command, so contemporary that we
can overlook his frequent (and Eliotic) returns to famous bits of the past –
for example, his rewrite, in A Worldly Country, of “Where are the songs of
spring?”:
Spring is the most important of the seasons.
It’s here even when it’s not here.
All the other seasons are an excuse for it.
Spring, idle spring,
you poor excuse for summer –
Did they tell you where they mislaid you,
on which arterial road piercing the city,
fast and faster like breath?
Here, where the rush of images that characterizes so much of his work drops
out, we may hear other kinds of variation in which John Ashbery specializes:
each line has a different pace, and a different tone. Which one fits the
absence of spring, the advent of adulthood, the long-ago disappearance of
our own youth? None, singly: all, together, might do.
Because he invented a style that can incorporate almost anything, because he
so often returns – whatever his modulations – to the same tonic and dominant
of loneliness and nostalgia, and because that style rarely demands (it more
often precludes) the kinds of closure that make poems by other good poets
seem like one-of-a-kind creations, Ashbery’s short poems can seem like
excerpts from his long ones (such as the book-length Flow Chart), or like
bolts of arbitrary size cut from one decades-long tapestry, its pronouns and
moods repeating like patterns in fabric. The poems are indeed too much like
one another – one sacrifices, especially in his last few books, variety
among the poems, but gets instead variety within them. Wildean remarks and
Sophoclean pronouncements, amusement-park gimmicks and desperate homages,
collide or interlace, all on one page, and almost always the poet reminds us
that he, like his page, must come to an end. “You will leave empty-handed, /
others will know more than you”, a poem called “Cliffhanger” warns, and then
concludes: “Now even the farthest windows have gone dark. And the dark /
wants us, needs us. Thank you for calling”.
When you interpret Ashbery at all, you risk having sceptics tell you that you
made it all up: that the poems demonstrate ingenuity not from the poet but
from his interpreters, who find music in static, meaning in randomness,
synthetic silk in a succession of sow’s ears. The same objections used to be
(and occasionally still are) levelled at people who spent time rereading
Eliot, or rereading Gertrude Stein (whom Ashbery admires). No one can prove
that Ashbery’s poems mean anything. But no one can prove that your life
means anything, either: on a good day, you feel able to keep on living it,
as John Ashbery has kept on writing, following a plan where a plan seems to
fit, but otherwise making it up as you go.
John Ashbery
A WORLDLY COUNTRY
New poems
76pp. Carcanet. Paperback, £9.95.
978 1 85754 919 5
NOTES FROM THE AIR
Selected later poems.
364pp. Carcanet. Paperback, £18.95.
978 1 85754 978 2
Stephen Burt's second collection of poems, Parallel Play, was published
in 2006. He is Associate professor of English at Harvard University and the
author of Popular Music, 1999, and The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-century
poetry and adolescence (2007).
